Macgamestore.com recently announced the addition of a new Universal Binary version of Feeding Frenzy to its catalog of downloadable game titles. In the game players must eat their way to the top of the food chain in a variety of underwater environments. Feeding Frenzy also includes unlockable bonuses and various facts about underwater life.

It's survival of the biggest in this action packed deep-sea challenge. Eat your way to the top of the food chain as you swim through stunning underwater environments and encounter deadly predators. Look out for the power-ups, mermaids, and bonus stages that you'll need to help you on your quest to unseat the vicious Shark King!

Looking for more? Unlock 6 different underwater screen savers by racking up points in your "Food Bank." Learn a thing or two about the amazing underwater world by checking out the "Fun Facts" at the end of each stage. Or, try "Time Attack" mode where you race against the clock as you eat your way up the food chain.

Inside Mac Games has posted a review of Electronic Arts' recently released racer, Need for Speed: Carbon. Here's a clip from the review:

Racing games generally fall somewhere on a spectrum between realistic and arcade style. NFS: Carbon in many respects falls firmly on the arcade side of the spectrum, opting for easy gameplay at the expense of realism. The first races are very easy to win, and you'll find that the game doesn't get significantly harder until you've reached about the 20% mark of your career. From that point the races will take a sharp upward curve in difficulty, going from really easy in some cases to very hard. For example, I was able to win my first canyon drift race easily and almost on my first try. My second drift race was a completely different story, requiring countless efforts and help from my racing gamer brother (with a 90,000 point drift) before we finally beat it.

Introversion Software and Sugarstar recently announced the release of the DEFCON soundtrack. Available for purchase from iTunes, the soundtrack features remastered music from Introversion's nuclear war themed strategy title.

Introversion can proudly announce that they have teamed up with indie record company Sugarstar to release the DEFCON soundtrack via iTunes. The re-mastered soundtrack is in 8 parts and stands proud as an album in it's own right. The DEFCON music was such a great composition that we really wanted to introduce it to non-gaming music lovers and our partnership with Sugarstar has enabled us to do this. The DEFCON soundtrack was composed by freelance musician Alistair Lindsay and Al continues to work with us on the audio for Multiwinia

Killap recently released the final version of his unofficial patch for Fallout 2, the second game in the classic post apocalyptic RPG franchise. The patch fixes over 800 bugs left over in the official 1.02 version.

This is the Mac version of my unofficial Fallout 2 patch. This patch has been in production for several years now and it fixes well over 800+ bugs left in the game since the official 1.02 patch. Please read the included readme for installation instructions. I hope you enjoy the best Fallout 2 experience yet!

Head over to the No Mutants Allowed site below to download the Mac version of the patch. As with all unofficial patches users install the update at their own risk.
NMA: Unofficial Fallout 2 Patch Mac

A new collection of 6 screenshots from the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard's second expansion for the ever popular World of Warcraft, is now available on the official site. Lich King will include an increased Level 80 cap for characters, the new area of Northrend to explore, and the first hero class in the game: the Death Knight.

Players last visited Northrend in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, when Arthas Menethil fused with the spirit of Ner’zhul to become the Lich King, one of the most powerful beings in the Warcraft universe. He now broods atop the Frozen Throne deep in Icecrown Citadel, clutching the rune blade Frostmourne and marshaling the undead armies of the Scourge. In Wrath of the Lich King, the forces of the Alliance and the Horde will venture into battle against the Scourge amid Northrend’s howling winds and fields of jagged ice.

With the opening of the Dark Portal, and the renewed war to stop the Burning Crusade’s destruction of worlds, the heroes of Azeroth have given little thought to the frozen wastes of Northrend - and the terrible, ancient powers that wait there. Yet the brooding evils of the fallen Nerubian empire and their malevolent sovereign have not forgotten Azeroth…

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has posted a new article focusing on the use of text in computer games. The feature includes comments from game developers like Chris Avellone and Sheldon Pacotti, and examines the ways game designers use text to craft game worlds even in today's graphics driven environment.

Words remain one of the more enigmatic yet efficient tools available to a professional game designer, and certainly one of the most overlooked. And its efficiency cannot really be overestimated – both in terms of player and development time. “Language (and prose in particular) remains an important tool for game designers because it’s malleable,” notes Sheldon Pacotti, writer on Deus Ex and now at Spector’s Junction Point, “One sentence can go from the Bronze Age to 21st-century Shanghai to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Imagine the development budget to represent that last sentence visually. Especially in adventure games, language is critical for conveying history, prophecy, and the multiplicity of a gameworld/society. Consider the dwarves’ song about Smaug at the start of the Hobbit. It moves from legends about the dragon to a prophecy of its doom in a matter of seconds, and for me this is where the book suddenly becomes not just a story but a complete world.”

“As the poly counts go up and the underlying technologies become ever more obscure,” he continues, “I hope that game designers will strive to go beyond linear space-time. The rush of immediate experience is what makes video games unique, but it’s also the medium’s greatest liability. We need to do more with the past, with consciousness, with point of view. Many designers feel this, even if they aren’t sure why, and that’s why text didn’t vanish after the advent of SVGA. Language is simply the cheapest tool for carving up space and time.” The reverse is equally true – while with enough of a budget, through montage or other effects, you can duplicate much of what words can do, it eats up time. For any amount of given time with the player, words can present a greater flow of ideas. While each of these may lack the impact of a single image, the developer can send barrages of concepts to send the player reeling. “We could accomplish many of the same things with cinematic techniques (montage, flashbacks, flash-forwards, narration) if we were willing to invest the time and money”, Sheldon notes. Time and money, of course, aren’t infinite.